Sweet Sin
by Wrong Name Tag
Summary: Cho Chang has ideas of her own; set in a post-Hogwarts world.


**Title:** _Sweet Sin_  
**Author:** Dancing Invalids  
**Rating:** PG  
**Summary:** Cho Chang has ideas of her own.  
**Warnings:** None  
**Disclaimer:** The characters, places, and names involved belong to the lovely J.K. Rowling. Some lines are from Shakespeare's _King Lear_. The plot and interpretations of these characters are the author's. No copyright infringement is intended and no money is being made off of this.  
**Word Count:** 1270  
**Author's Notes: **Another story written such a very long time ago, but one I'm fond of. The ship has become one of my secret fetishes, a guilty pleasure. All constructive criticism is welcome.

That pairing would be Draco/Cho, by the way. Gray eyes, lovelies.

* * *

A graceful finger lingered on the windowsill, dipping in the cracks in the archaic stone. Constantly moving, it made its way to the jagged bottom corner and back up the side. The hand attached to the wandering digit soon pressed itself against the thick glass, pausing for a moment. When it withdrew, a fleeting outline of a delicate hand appeared like painted steam.

Cho Chang's bottom lip extended itself, forming a well-developed pout.

The Spanish summer night was humid enough to let her play such games on window panes, but it was nothing to the English winters where the sharp contrast of inside and outside climates permitted her warm touch across the frosty glass to hover longer in existence.

That distraction had been missed the last winter.

With a wistful sigh she turned back to look at the world outside her and her beloved's villa. Though her eyes stood still on various scenes, her body was always moving. Her hips swayed to some mournful tune strummed from a guitar played on the streets; one hand tucked a piece of hair behind her ear while the other removed it moments later; her toes tapped up and down in her flimsy sandals. Once, she even let out a sharp laugh as a man went racing down the cobblestones, two members of the _policía_ coming up behind him.

"_Through tattered clothes small vices do appear."_

The man was poor, hardly worth chasing after. His clothes were in sharp disarray, his feet bare and caked with dust and a coating of dried blood. Whatever hair he had once possessed was falling out of his scalp from sparse nutrition. Extra skin bunched at his joints, showing signs of a man once much more accustomed to hearty meals. Still, despite his deficiencies, he ran with pride and a loaf of bread clutched between bone-like fingers. And though the bread couldn't have cost more than a euro or two -- less than a handful of sickles if the man had been of any magical competency -- the two men ran to catch him as if the fate of all that was good was on the shoulders of that one man's capture.

"_Robes and furred gowns hide all."_

The corners of Cho's mouth turned up in a bitter smile. He hadn't the prestige or the affluence to get away with such a petty thing as stealing. But she -- she now had both the glamour and the capital to pull off the most dastardly deeds without a soul turning up their wands or closing off their thoughts to her.

Gauze cloth swished around her legs. She was moving. She went quietly through broad rooms and empty studies overwhelmed with Dark Arts books and brewing potions, moving as swiftly and silently as a lethifold stalking after its prey.

Breathing steadily and with her gaze focused straight ahead, she didn't pause until she came to a room near the front of the villa. A _creak_ sounded as she stepped on the wood panel placed along the doorway. A sharp intake of breath later, she wondered why he had ever thought a wood panel would be a good idea in a house built of stone. Her mind wandered to other things as she swept around the room, the train of her nearly-transparent gown billowing behind her, urged on to movement by an incoming wind whistling through an open window. Dipping her hand into drawers that stood ajar and pulling back the curtains of an elegant four-poster, she made her way about the room. Confident in her airs and at home in the place she was snooping in, Cho was startled to awareness while sifting through the clothes (mostly black robes cut for simplicity) hanging on a golden pole extended across a recess in the wall.

Soft sound was the most dangerous sort.

A butterfly hand jittered upon a pitter-pattering heart. Rust eyes that withered anything in their sight slipped to the space between the doorframe and down to the piece of wood plastered to the ground by magic. Nothing rested there. A hollow laugh escaped between drawn lips, pursed tight and whitened in fright. A mere phantom, sent in by way of wind to urge the fibers of the panel to creak a needless warning.

Her head swung side to side, stick-straight raven hair dancing around her vision. Silently, she was laughing at herself. Ghosts and phantoms; nothing to be fearful of.

She gently stroked the cloth of the robes before her, and then jostled them to one side.

Ah, her pride and joy. Malicious intentions sweeping through her joints -- the wand tucked inside her gown tingling with the knowledge of such sin -- she seized the hooded and masked robe. After pressing the material close to her chest for a moment, she flung it over her head and down onto her body. One hand extended, she let it linger over a mark she knew existed on her left forearm.

Cho pulled the hood up to cover the sides of her face, but let the mask sit snuggly on top of her head. She carefully stepped over the wood panel on her way out of her the room, and went just as stealthily as before through the halls. Her steps only stopped when she pulled the door to the front of the villa open.

A rush of warm air pushed in to overwhelm the villa, but the door closed and her wand slid down the arm of her sleeve to tap the gold-plated handle. Humid air danced around her body, clung to her skin and slipped beneath her treasured robe.

Quickly, she had to move quickly, now.

Her sandals hardly voiced a sound as she hurried across the cobblestones and down a set of stairs. Soon, she fell ankle-deep into sand warmed by a day of vibrant sun.

The night was dark. Movement of any kind was hindered by the clammy air; the broad leaves of the palms stood contentedly on the fat, ribbed trunks. Waves hardly washed up on shore. It was a perfect time to choose for such an action -- sound had nowhere to go in such conditions.

A figure lay sprawled out on the beach, the tips of his toes dipped into the water like strawberries in chocolate. His cream skin was pure and untainted, his body curved as if he were a fawn sleeping peacefully under its mother's watch. When Cho came close enough, she could see the lids of his eyes closed tight like the curtains of a stage play closed after the show and round of applause. She wished those eyes would flutter open to the forestry of knowledge held beneath them, but the figure showed no sign of waking in any near future. Indeed, the body hardly stirred in its sleep.

Cho extended her arm, the wand slipping down and through her fingers and down the stretch of the palm of her hand. The words she wished to utter were just on the tip of her tongue, ready to be whispered from her mouth like rain slipping off the wax covering on forest leaves when --

"Shh, mi amor." A pale hand, shining brightly enough to replace the moon in the sky, reached out to place a left index finger across her lips. A gold wedding band brushed her cheek; she fingered her own matching one. She turned her withering gaze up to meet his of frost. Such a brilliant shade ofgray were they; so manipulative. "There'll be time enough to rid our life of Potter."

"_Plate sin with gold._"


End file.
